// PC GAMER — GAMING
My quick test of Lumen Lite shows that it's probably good news for ray-traced gaming on handheld PCs, but I suspect that it will be used everywhere because of the pressure developers are now under
With studios being closed down faster than you can blink, every coder is going to be using one-click fixes.
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At its State of Unreal event in Chicago, Epic Games officially unveiled Unreal Engine 5.8, and one of its key new features is Lumen Lite: a scalability setting that targets the use of ray-traced global illumination for the Nintendo Switch 2, with the goal of 60 fps. As the feature also works for PCs, I thought I'd dive in and check out just what the fuss is all about. Or if indeed any fuss ought to be made.
By default, the Unreal Engine editor gives developers a simplified way of checking out various graphics settings to see how they affect performance and visual quality. There are 11 separate options that can be tweaked, but the new Lumen Lite mode only affects global illumination (GI) and reflections, as these are the main things that Epic's ray tracing system affects.
In older versions of UE, switching to 'Medium' GI and reflections fully disables Lumen, but in the latest release, the same setting enables Lumen GI, though reflections are still screen-spaced, i.e. SSR. Ray-traced global illumination is normally the preserve of the 'High' or 'Epic' settings, so to make it more performant for low-end GPUs, Lumen Lite replaces a key stage in the lighting process with something quicker but lower in quality than the usual system.
I first caught a glimpse of this in action via Skydek's YouTube channel, earlier this year, and the end results looked really promising, as Lumen Light was giving up to 40% more performance for very little difference in visual quality. But watching the demo, set in a fairly simple environment and using software Lumen, I kept wondering how much of a difference it would make when hardware Lumen is used and in a graphics-heavy scenario.
To that end, I fired up Unreal Engine 5.6 and 5.8, and used Epic's Electric Dreams Environment demo to see Lumen Lite in action. Now, as I'm merely a UE hobbyist, I did nothing more than install all the assets for each UE build and check out the performance in the viewport.
This is very much a 'worst-case scenario' or, if you prefer, a 'Nick is rather lazy' scenario, as the displayed performance is not even remotely representative of how it would all be in an actual game, and I've just clicked a few buttons, rather than directly adjusting the code for the graphics settings and then building the full demo.
Anyway, let's set the scene, as so to speak, by seeing everything in action in Unreal Engine 5.8, using Epic scalability and materials. It's not the very highest setting you can use, but in the case of Lumen, it's for targeting consoles at 30 fps. I've used a Core Ultra 270K Plus with a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, so not console-like at all, but as you can see, it certainly looks great, albeit with a rather low frame rate.
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